Today’s image of the day is called Stairs of Mont­martre, Paris by the late mas­ter Hun­gar­ian pho­tog­ra­pher Andre Kertesz, and it was shot in 1925. Kertesz is one of my all time favorite pho­tog­ra­phers and more of his work will surely be fea­tured in the future.

Stairs of Mont­martre, Paris — 1925 by Andre Kertesz

What makes this, and tons of other Kertesz images fan­tas­tic is the pre­cise and delib­er­ate com­po­si­tion. Kertesz was sim­ply a mas­ter at guid­ing your eye to inter­est­ing places in the pho­to­graph. The shapes of the shad­ows and the posi­tion of the rail­ings are both delight­ful to look at and they guide your eye per­fectly toward the humans in the photo.

Kertesz was also keenly aware of all planes of focus in an image and how they work together. The con­nec­tion between the fore­ground, midground and the back­ground ele­ments of this image helps to sug­gest a story as well as make the image graph­i­cally striking.

The vin­tage photo of the day is from the series Por­tu­gal by Mas­ter Czech pho­tog­ra­pher Josef Koudelka and was taken in 1976. Koudelka is well known for his work pho­tograph­ing Gyp­sies in Slo­va­kia and Roma­nia as well as cap­tur­ing the daily‚interactions‚of peo­ple from many dif­fer­ent (mostly) Euro­pean countries.

Joseph Koudelka — Por­tu­gal — 1976

What attracts us to this image is the sense of story com­bined with bril­liant com­po­si­tion. I don’t know what the story is here but it’s a drama. Older man waits in back­ground with a shad­owed pro­file over­look­ing a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion. The woman is smil­ing in pro­file, per­haps try­ing to soothe or coax the young girl, and the child is con­cerned. What is hap­pen­ing to her? For me, this scene is filled with tension.

Com­po­si­tion­ally, this image is a master-class. Angu­lar lines add to the ten­sion in the image. Tri­an­gles (our eyes love‚triangles) are every­where . Cor­ners, angled light rays, noses, table ends, knee bends, elbows are just a few of the tri­an­gles that we see. Look harder and you’ll see more of them…it’s no acci­dent that they are there. Even the inter­ac­tion (both obvi­ous and sub­tle) between the 3‚individuals‚is tri­an­gu­lar. Some fine black and white print­ing with a rich assort­ment of tones further‚adds to this image’s impact.

The vin­tage photo of the day is called Saint-Cloud (a sub­urb of Paris, France) by Eugene Atget and was taken in the early 1920’s. Atget is well known for for doc­u­ment­ing the land­scape, urban­scape, parks and street scenes and of ” Old” Paris‚in the late 1800’s and early part of the twen­ti­eth century.

Saint-Cloud by Eugene Atget 1921–1922

Although newer pho­tog­ra­phers might look at this image and go “meh”, there’s actu­ally lots of inter­est­ing stuff to look at due to the care­ful com­po­si­tion. The repeat­ing cone-shaped trees and their shad­ows are the focal points of the image and their shapes are some­what repeated by the other trees in the back­ground. Great use of lead­ing lines and shapes cre­ated in both the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive areas of this pho­to­graph make it far more intrigu­ing than it ini­tially seems.

The‚George‚Eastman‚house also has quite a good col­lec­tion of Atget pho­tographs for those that want to see more of this Master’s work.

http://www.geh.org/fm/atget/htmlsrc/atget_sld00001.html